Nice advice, there's a lot of variation on the role. And yet, some things seem to always be there.

This is a good overview of what the Staff Engineer can be. There's of course a lot of variation depending on time, priorities and the culture of the organisation.

This is good advice. To improve your organisation, focus only on the biggest constraint. Otherwise you'll quickly be spread thin.

This has been documented for a long while. Of course, it's been followed by an unhealthy fascination for the "Toyota way". This kind of cargo cult of course lead you nowhere to doing things properly. And yet, now that the dust settled, there are good lessons to learn from Toyota management back then.

Good questions to consider to gauge how you work. Can improve the organisation if you really get to the bottom of it.

This is very true. It's not like whoever produced bad code is particularly stupid, in most cases it's the context around which breaks the people.

That's one of those pieces where the clear cut categories look a bit like caricature. That said, that gives an idea of the kind of posture one should try to reach to be a good manager.

It's important to get to the bottom of problems indeed. The context in your organisation will matter for this.

Indeed, I think I prefer what's proposed here rather than READMEs. Having lightweight templates and processes to collect the information you need or steer the direction puts the burden of designing those in the right place (on the manager end). You should also know when things have to be more free form.

In other words, remember you're a manager and not a nanny. Of course, it doesn't mean you can freely ignore the human factor or empathy. Just don't get overwhelmed by this.

An excellent piece, I like this kind of thinking. It works in fact as several level in your life.

Interesting thinking, indeed expectations are changing quite a bit for engineering managers over time. Thus the proposed list of core and growth skills is interesting. It is likely a good framing for the job, then the art is finding the right balance for your organisation.

Very interesting maturity model about proper communication in a remote work setup. I think it definitely makes sense and doesn't feel too difficult to evaluate.

Interesting view... This explains quite well why most organizations have both formal and informal processes. I'm not sure I agree that the informal will always be fought against by management though. I've seen clever management which accepts the informal processes as long as it doesn't harm the organization.

I think the Open Agile Adoption ideas have been unfortunately unnoticed. It's thus hard to tell if it would have been fairly efficient. What's sure though is that the widespread mandate approach used during the past decade does a disservice to teams.

Nice list of templates to use for better handling of engineering management in your organisation. Pick, choose and adapt what makes sense to the context.

Indeed, stress can't be completely eliminated... but at least build an environment where risky situations are reduced as much as possible. So that when stress or anxiety shows up you can take notice and react. Otherwise you'll be creating vicious circles.

Everyone makes mistakes eventually, the real difference is in how you deal with them.

Interesting stuff. Indeed, we can easily trigger such negative feedback loops... Makes me think that compounded with impostor syndrome or unsupportive management you can really create dysfunctional teams in the workplace. This gives insights on how to get out of it.

It is indeed often the system. Now what the article is not talking about is that sometimes people do everything they can so that the system doesn't change.